Alice C. Fletcher's Indian Story and Song from North America
The volume includes thirty songs, many of them Omaha, and likely collected during her fieldwork or recording sessions in Washington, D.C. It is not clear the origins of those songs that are not identified as Omaha. The song titles, and the accompanying descriptive stories, are problematic from today's perspective. As was was standard practice for the time, the transcriptions rely on "Western" staff notation, rendering complex rhythmic and melodic patterns into more simplistic--and frankly inaccurate--formats. More egregious yet, just like the transcriptions included in A Study of Omaha Indian Music, was the presentation of them in a harmonized format. This volume also drew on the work of Fillmore who had "proposed ways in which monophonic Indian chants could be harmonized and, as he saw it, made more palatable to "cultured tastes." (Fillmore, 1893 "Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music" quoted in Pisani 2005: 168).
Fletcher's preface reveals both her hopes for the volume and her embodiment of the colonialist attitudes of the time: that the transcriptions might provide raw material for composers and that, like her contemporaries, she subscribed to social Darwinism, i.e. social evolutionist trajectories about the relative development, civilization, and, thus, worth of Indigenous peoples and their sonic practices.
As Fletcher writes in the preface,
The setting of Indigenous materials as source material for settler composers was just gaining traction at the time. Fillmore himself was one of the first to engage this practice, composing Indian Fantasia No. 1, "a set of variations on the original "Hae -thu-ska" song he received from Fletcher" in 1890 (Pisani 2005:172; see Levine 2002 for more details about the earliest arrangements and compositions).several essays upon the songs of the North American Indians were read [at the Congress], in illustration of which a number of Omaha Indians, for the first time, sang their native melodies to an audience largely composed of trained musicians.
The unique presentation [of these songs at the Congress] not only demonstrated the scientific value of these aboriginal songs in the study of the development of music, but suggested their availability as themes, novel and characteristic, for the American composer. It was felt that this availability would be greater if the story, or the ceremony which gave rise to the song, could be known, so that, in developing the theme, all the movements might be consonant with the circumstances that had inspired the motive (1900: preface, vii).
The social Darwinist attitudes are encompassed in such statements as the following, where Fletcher comments that she put together the volume so
that the general public may share with the student the light shed by these untutored melodies upon the history of music; for these songs take us back to a stage of development antecedent to that in which culture music appeared among the ancients, and reveal to us something of the foundations upon which rests the art of music as we know it to-day (preface viii).
As she goes on to state,
this music possesses a charm of spontaneity that cannot fail to please those who would come near to nature and enjoy the expression of emotion untrammelled by the intellectual control of schools. These songs are like the wild flowers that have not yet come under the transforming hand of the gardener (preface viii-ix).
Such statements suggest that the sonic practices of Indigenous peoples, identified as music, are evidence of an earlier phase of musical development, a more "natural"--or "wild"--state. They also function to deny the contemporaneity of Indigenous practices, projecting them--and the people who practice them--into a distant past. This is a fundamental denial of the coeval presence of Indigenous people, an attitude that has continued to exist since the time of Fletcher's time of writing at the end of the nineteenth century. The final sentence here, as Pisani suggests, is that despite extensive fieldwork among and friendship with Omaha peoples, she still viewed their musical practices as less developed and in need of being tamed by the gardener, that is the composer would take the raw tunes and turn them into something more beautiful.
Indian Story and Song, then, was intended to provide source material for composers to use for arrangements and compositions. As Pisani states, "The book circulated widely and remained one of the chief sources for composers of "Indian music" for the next two decades" (2005:176), i.e. through to the 1920s. My aim is not to track all the sources that referenced it here, but to illustrate the social use to which these stories and harmonized transcriptions were put through the collection that Franz Joseph Zeisberg titled Primitive Indian Tunes. Twelve of the twenty-one arrangements he presented, mostly re-arrangements of Fillmore's original harmonizations, drew on material from Fletcher's book.